MMOs and game design

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[Rift] And if you get bored with the fashion disasters, you can always go get dominated by a shagwolf

I’m slowly making my way towards level 50 in Rift, and very much liking Stillmoor as a zone. It’s a classic “vampires and werewolves” style of fantasy zone, with several little towns/ cities to explore. I love urban environments in fantasy games, and I thought this was a nice example.

But Stillmoor is a zone with ISSUES. Or at least the NPCs have issues.

In case you can’t read the text in that bottom picture, it shows me fighting a “dominating shagwolf.” Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

And because we haven’t had any screenies of Rift fashion disasters lately, I’ll make it up with some shots of an entire fashion disaster village that I came across.

It’s not the skin I’m concerned about (although the gal on the end has suspiciously balloon-like boobs – maybe the defiants have invented plastic surgery) so much as how dreadful they look, especially the women. I mean semi naked men in long skirts is at least a LOOK, it screams ‘sorcerer from a Conan film’ but that’s ok.

I hate to make the obvious Penny Arcade reference here, but, gosh, did anyone give the devs any shit over this? Or is it just more obviously a joke if said with an accent and using “shag” instead of “dick”?

(which is to say, not only can you make it up, but you can get dragged through the sewers over it, as well!)

I think this is sad, because the first screens of RIFT, long before Trion called it RIFT, female NPC’s where clothed and figured very moderatly. Kinda how they look in the first Dragon Age. It’s too bad that “fan service” has crept into their design direction when it was never needed.

This is true. There are plenty in perfectly reasonable clothes and maybe I’ll show some of those next time.

One of the nice things about the new cosmetic clothing/wardrobe is that you do have a lot of control about how your character looks. So frex if you pick up some leg armour which looks like skimpy bikini bottoms when you put it on, you can always have some kind of robe or something to cover it.

I think what got me about the woman on the left is that not only is she in a bikini top and loincloth (not actually a crime against fashion in itself) but she also has these weird shoulder things going on, and then the thigh high stockings and bracers. You can see how the guy next to her has clothes that match and she doesn’t.